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Surprise, Surprise. Many of the “Work Coaches” ranting about using Universal Jobmatch for your jobsearch applied for theirs through a different system entirely.

Despite spending £17m of taxpayers money giving the old site the ability to upload a CV, and very basic skill matching amongst a few others, and the cost of £6m a year to keep it running, the Civil Service and various other public sector bodies actually use a different e-recruitment system from WCN. No details of how much this cost the taxpayer is available in the public domain.

Ironic isn’t it? The Government ploughs millions of pounds of taxpayers money into ‘developing’ Universal Jobmatch by tendering it out to Monster who modified their pretty-poor job board (no, not the one they use for monster.co.uk, one even worse than that!) into “DirectGov” colours, just to add functionality of CV upload and tracking for jobseekers.

Hundreds of thousands of people hunting for work on a ­government jobs website may have been chasing posts that never existed, ministers admit.

Nearly 60% of employment advertised on the Universal Jobmatch scheme could have been placed by bogus firms – some of which have been demanding upfront fees from applicants for fake background checks.

A third of a million job vacancies advertised on the government’s official website for jobseekers are suspected of being bogus, falsely promoted or against the rules, documents seen by the Guardian show.Frank Field, a Labour MP and former minister, has established that officials are concerned about more than 350,000 vacancies promoted on the Universal Jobmatch site, which must be used by unemployed people to apply for jobs in order to claim benefits. This amounts to around half of the jobs currently being advertised on the flagship website that Iain Duncan Smith, the work…

Universal Jobmatch has come under fire for the number of fake employers posting adverts on websites that redirect (or encourage people to click through) to CV Library affiliate links, and claims that they are making £1 per CV uploaded. Is this true? Who is CV Library? We will tell you more.

The company turnover was almost 8.8m last year with a gross profit of £5.9m making just under £3m in profit. The company paid just over £888,000 in Corporation Tax and paid the directors (shareholders) £2,610,178 in dividends – the majority of the profit. The company had £3,192,014 in the bank at the end of the year.

They boast 7.1 million CVs (an increase of 30% on the previous year) and 2.3 million users. Job postings have increased 33% on last…

So whilst just as much of the public is up-in-arms about the Fake Jobs Scam as there are fake jobs (around 95%) its is nothing compared to the financial scandal surrounding the tendering process. The value far exceeds £1m so its classified as serious fraud. Hat tip to refuted for pointing out about the £950,000 Universal Jobmatch payoff.

A tweet by Simon Jones provides a link to a Freedom of Information request detailing about two tenders for the Universal Jobmatch system – we reveal below further details including how Monster appeared to be third in the initial results of the first tender but managed to win the second tender – you can view the full FOI here (pdf).

Full Credit to Andy Hyams on WhatDoTheyKnow for making the FoI request!

In this article we will show you how to kick the scammers where it hurts! Remember, DWP would want to sweep this under the carpet… it’s not in their best interest to lose up to 95% of the jobs. If you want to safeguard your benefits and your personal information the best way is to get the fraudsters to retreat as Jobcentre Plus won’t do anything about it.

You can pick and choose how you fight back – but most importantly don’t fight back alone. Spread the word.

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Kill their income

The primary reason why most of these scams operate is to receive income directly from jobseekers like you (rather than indirectly by selling your…

Ipswich Unemployed Action begins with Part 1 of ‘Fake Employers’ on Universal Jobmatch.

What is a “fake employer”? This is any vacancy that will never result in getting a job; the company might exist but may live off revenue from CV Library or Indeed affiliate schemes – or Google Adsense advertisements. In more cases than not, it doesn’t exist, and is to steal personal information or profit from selling your information.

Fake employers types include:-

Relay Ads – Just posting other job vacancies (whether the original advert job exists or not) usually to promote their own job website, with intention of jobseekers clicking on a Google Adsense advert along side or uploading a CV through CV Library.

Fake Job Adverts – Creating fake adverts to entice people on to their website to get revenue through Google Adsense, CV library or Indeed affiliate scheme. This is identical to the…

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